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The Unshielded Receiver: Telepathy, Scanners, and the Exhaustion of High – IQ Living

When Robert Silverberg published his 1972 novel Dying Inside , he gave science fiction one of its most poignant deconstructions of a “superpower.” His protagonist, David Selig, is a telepath, but his ability is not a glamorous tool for saving the world or outmatching adversaries. Instead, it is an involuntary, exhausting affliction—a leaky psychic sieve that drains his vitality and alienates him from the ordinary forms of trust, privacy, and communication that hold human society together. Selig cannot turn his receiver off. He is constantly bombarded by the petty, desperate, mundane, and painful inner monologues of strangers on the subway, lovers in bed, and colleagues at his failing freelance writing jobs. When we hold modern pop psychology’s romanticized framing of neurodivergence, high intellect, and psychological traits as superpowers up to the mirror of Selig’s telepathy, a fascinating and uncomfortable critique emerges. Both phenomena reveal a cultural impulse to turn vulnerabi...
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Human Meaning: A Philosophical Taxonomy of Expectation and Evaluation

Introduction Human beings are creatures caught between temporal currents. We constantly look backward and inward to evaluate the data of our lived experience, while simultaneously projecting our gaze forward to anticipate where the world is heading. Traditional personality frameworks—such as the Big Five or the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator—excel at mapping behavioral traits, cognitive styles, and social preferences. However, they frequently overlook the deeper existential bedrock upon which those behaviors rest: how we conceptualize time and meaning . To bridge this gap, a truly robust taxonomy of human worldview must account for two orthogonal dimensions: Evaluation (our reading of incoming reality across past and present) and Expectation (our projection of the future bound up with the presence or absence of existential meaning). By crossing four modes of evaluation ( Optimism, Pessimism, Realism, Nihilism ) with four modes of expectation ( Hopeful, Hopeless, Cynical, Radical ), ...
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Ambushed in the Library

For most of my life, I have played chess as an intuitive act. To me, the 64 squares were never a math problem or a spreadsheet waiting to be filled; they were a living landscape of tension, rhythm, and psychology. I shunned the heavy opening manuals, avoided memorizing long strings of theoretical variations, and trusted my gut. If a position felt right, if my pieces hummed with a certain dynamic harmony, I played the move and let the game unfold organically over the board. For decades, that approach was entirely valid. Chess was a human dialogue, a messy, beautiful negotiation between two minds sitting across a wooden table, navigating fear, fatigue, and sudden flashes of creative inspiration. Then came the silicon era, and with it, a quiet and total revolution that changed the very psychology of the game. Today, playing chess without deep, front–end preparation is no longer just a minor stylistic handicap—it is an invitation to catastrophe. If I sit down to play now and fail to pay ...
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Drive Angry! - A Note on Indefensible Logics

The defense of the indefensible has always been a provocative literary parlor trick, and when Rick Rosner published “Road Rage Is Good” in Esquire back in 2005, it functioned for me as high–wire satire. He took an antisocial, hazardous impulse—screaming at slow drivers and weaponizing a vehicle out of petty frustration—and dressed it in the sharply tailored suit of civic duty, self–actualization, and moral parenting. It inverted the ethical compass deliberately, inviting readers to laugh at the audacity of a narrator who claimed that losing his temper was actually a public service. Today, however, I watch as the landscape has radically shifted, migrating from the glossy pages of mid–2000s magazine culture straight into the operating system of public life. To understand where this trajectory leads, I feel we must first examine what an indefensible logic actually is, trace its evolution from irony to infrastructure, and confront the ultimate question of whether the normalization of t...
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A Brief Note on Instrumental Will

The traditional debate over free will has long been trapped in an intellectual swamp, paralyzed by a false binary. We are asked to choose between two equally grim alternatives: either we possess a mystical, uncaused bubble of agency operating in a pristine vacuum, or we are nothing more than biological puppets bouncing helplessly down a pre–calculated slope of physics, genetics, and environmental conditioning. Both views treat human choice as an anomaly—either a miraculous violation of natural law or a pathetic illusion. But when we view consciousness through the thermodynamic lens of intelligence as an anti–entropic force, a completely new paradigm emerges. We can move past the sterile stalemate of classical determinism and step into the domain of what might be called “instrumental will.” To understand instrumental will, we must first recognize that true autonomy has never been about operating in a vacuum. Uninstrumental will—the raw impulse to act without data, structure, or pred...
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The Anti-Entropy Mind

In his 1944 lectures on What is Life? , physicist Erwin Schrödinger proposed a radical framing for living systems: life, he suggested, maintains its internal organization and resists decay by “drinking order” from its environment, effectively metabolizing negative entropy to stave off the universal pull toward thermodynamic equilibrium. While Schrödinger applied this insight to biological metabolism, a deeper and perhaps more profound manifestation of this principle operates at an entirely different tier of reality. If life is matter fighting physical decay at the cellular level, intelligence is the insurgent force that fights entropy at an informational level. It is the universe waking up locally to carve out structured, predictable, and purposeful citadels against a sea of infinite noise. To understand intelligence as an anti–entropic property, one must first confront the fundamental nature of the cosmos, which naturally trends toward maximum disorder, uniform randomness, and deg...
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Living in the Age of Augmented Intelligence

The measurement of human intelligence has long been tethered to an engineering aesthetic of the industrial age: standardized, isolated, and rigidly uniform. From the early twentieth–century psychometric tests designed to sort draftees and schoolchildren to the bizarre mid–century television parlor tricks that attempted to measure genius by ocular stillness, our society has harbored an enduring obsession with distilling the magnificent, sprawling complexity of human cognition into a single, static number. For decades, the IQ test reigned as the supreme scorecard of human potential. Yet, looking across the landscape of modern life—and particularly at the arrival of advanced artificial intelligence—that traditional obsession increasingly resembles a sport played by a tiny fraction of specialists, akin to the World’s Strongest Man competition. Watching a professional athlete lift a boulder two and a half feet in diameter is an astonishing physical feat, but it has almost nothing to do w...
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